My ways are not your ways

"My ways are not your ways"

Can you imagine playing Kasparov at chess? I think he'd wipe
the floor with me! Or can you imagine a six year old child debating
Physics with Einstein?

Or could your own child, at the age of four, understand the
skills and intricacies of what you do at school or college or work?
Probably not, because what you do is so much more complex than a young
child's, and they just don't have the vocabulary.

Could you begin to explain it? Perhaps a little; but there
are limits to what they can understand at so young an age. You would
certainly have to explain in very simple language, and that might give
them a glimpse of what you do.

In the same way, God is far more complex than we are, and we cannot
understand him fully. If we read the book of the Isaiah in the Bible, we
find these words in chapter 55, verses 8 and 9, spoken through Isaiah, who
was a prophet:

"My thoughts are completely different
from yours," says the Lord. "And my ways are
far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher
than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts
higher than your thoughts."

This means that we can only glimpse a portion of what God is
doing in our lives and in the lives of others. There is an inevitable gap
in understanding.

However, God provides a means to bridge that gap in two
ways:

He has given us the Bible, which we sometimes refer to as
"the word of God". We believe that the books of the bible have been given
to mankind as a sort of Handbook or Manual. It contains answers to many
questions, and the beginnings of many understandings. And the Bible stands
on the assumption that God speaks and people can hear him. And some
special people were chosen to write down what God has revealed. And some
people can hear God today, and they reveal what God chooses to reveal
through them.

Just as the Bible was written in the light of the
understanding given by the Holy Spirit, so we need to read it in the same
light. And that requires faith. If you will believe and trust in Jesus
Christ, then pray and ask God to reveal the meaning of the "scriptures"
(that is, the writings in the Bible) through the understanding of his Holy
Spirit.

These revelations through the scriptures eventually become
part of us, and help to change us into the sort of person that God wants
us to become, deep down inside where it counts. And only God can do this.

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